DRM: Digital Rights or Digital Restrictions?

David Chisnall examines DRM and concludes that DRM restricts copying to the detriment — rather than advantage — of the content producers. Regulating the use of media content is really an attempt to hold back the development of technology.

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DRM—Digital Rights Management to its advocates, Digital
Restrictions Management to its detractors—seems to be added to
all forms of media these days. It’s usually billed as an anti-piracy
mechanism, but in reality it comes down to control. Copy protection, the
predecessor to DRM, was intended to control illegal copying. DRM expands on this
strategy by attempting to control what you can do with media. This extends the
rights granted by copyright beyond exclusive distribution to regulation of
use.

How DRM Works

At its heart, DRM is a cryptographic system. The medium protected by DRM must
be encoded in some way to prevent it from being played without the consent of
the DRM system. In practical terms, this means that it must be encrypted. A
traditional cryptographic system involves sending a message from one person to
another without an attacker being able to intercept the message. In the case of
DRM, the recipient of the message and the attacker are the same person. As you
can imagine, this arrangement presents some difficulties for designers of DRM
systems. The most common solution is to require a closed system.